The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
By Jonathon Naylor In unceremoniously obliterating the NOR-MAN Regional Health Authority, the provincial government is taking the politically expedient way out of a messy situation. Engulfed in controversy for the last couple of years, the NRHA had become something of an albatross around the neck of a government hyper-sensitive to discord of any sort. So in a budget unveiled Tuesday, the NDP decided to distance itself from past and future criticism of the NRHA by making it so there will be no more NRHA. Flin Flon, The Pas and the 10 other communities now served by the NRHA will merge with the Burntwood RHA out of Thompson, creating one mega RHA -- the Northern Health Region -- for most of the North. This amalgamation will water down the control Flin Flonners have over our health care system. It will force our community to compete not only with The Pas, but also Thompson, for precious health resources. And it will likely mean job losses, as you can bet your bottom dollar that the Northern Health Region will be headquartered in Thompson, the centre of the northern Manitoba universe, not the NRHA's home base of Flin Flon. Granted, critics of the NRHA are probably overjoyed. To them, this marks the logical end point for an organization that was essentially broken beyond repair. But the fact is that the NRHA, while imperfect, was never hopeless. Yes, there have been tales of alleged misdiagnoses. Yes, there was the embarrassing and potentially dangerous hiring of fraudster Lloyd Carr as a counsellor. And yes, elderly people have had to make their home in our hospital due to a lack of care home beds. But to just shut down the whole operation the year after concluding an in-depth review on ways to improve the NRHA? Talk about a waste. Less administration What about the cost implications? With less administration staff needed, the province expects to save $10 million over the next three years by combining NOR-MAN and Burntwood and merging eight other RHAs. That's $3.33 million a year in savings across Manitoba, or an average of $666,667 per merger. From that we can estimate that the NOR-MAN-Burntwood amalgamation will amount to 0.0059 per cent of the total provincial spending that was projected in 2011-12. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for cutting needless spending. And it does seem that dollars which should have gone toward attracting front-line workers to the NRHA was instead consumed by bureaucracy. It just appears that the NRHA was never given the chance to fully right its ship, to make things better for the public it serves. How much more difficult will that task become in a larger, Thompson-centred RHA? According to the Winnipeg Free Press, the RHA mergers will take place in the coming months and likely be completed by the fall. Only at that point will we be able to truly judge whether the NDP's 'one size fits most of the North' approach is useful. Certainly the early predictors are not encouraging for our community. Local Angle runs Fridays.
